Can NOT resist. Myspace.cn has just opened up and you must take a look if you haven’t already. It’s almost worth creating a MySpace page.

The front page shows 3 mainland Chinese users and 3 international users, and they can all friend each other. How do they choose who gets on the page as international users? Unclear. But Tom is every Chinese MySpace user’s first friend, as usual. Seems like there might not be that many Chinese users…or maybe not that many writing in English. Unclear.

Maybe Chinese users will pick up on it in order to meet people from other places; or maybe there will be a Chinese-language only group that doesn’t interact at all with people outside China. If the numbers pick up in China, this could skew most popular blogs, videos, and so on on MySpace. Hard to say what will happen. Some thoughts about what could be:

MySpace users outside China get to expand their friends list by…exponentially. Expect contests for most friends to move to the next level.

Chinese MySpace users get to make friends with some really different kinds of people than they’ve met before, like Barbie Gangsta Bitch, for instance, in the US. They’ll talk in English mostly.

Non-Chinese MySpace users get exposed to a wide variety of Chinese people: from serious as in DIck, 24, in Chongqing who wants to meet “the president of every country
the famous economists” to sassy like Kiki Lee, 24, in Shanghai. Chance to practice Chinese for all those kids in the US now studying Mandarin; chance to meet Chinese people before your next trip to China.

Chinese pages are for the most part uncustomized at the moment, but that will no doubt change. Everybody gets to see what the others like, listen to, and think is funny. Perhaps some trading and remixing might go on, new fads, new widgets, etc..

Indie music outside of China gets exposed to the Chinese market; and vice versa. Possibilities there.

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◆Lyn Jeffery is a cultural anthropologist and researcher at the Institute for the Future, a nonprofit group in Palo Alto, California. She studies new experiences enabled by connective technologies.

6 comments on “Chinese MySpace: strange crosscultural platform”

Or maybe it’ll just flounder in a sea of indigeneous social networks.
Sorry to be a killjoy, but alot of Chinese bands have had MySpace sites already. Kiki, whom you link to above, has been on the English MySpace for a while (replace .cn with .com in her profile).
I don’t think friending contests will skyrocket because of this. My guess is having an extra 200 Chinese MySpace friends who don’t speak English will be considered “cheating”.
MySpace better have some killer marketing app handy, or my guess is they’ll just do modestly at best. If not tank.

I agree–it could flounder in the sea of myspace-like sites…but it has the key difference of linking people with foreign friends, in a non-dating format. So it might attract those Chinese (students mostly) who want to know more about people outside China.
If it is seen as a place to open up your network beyond China, and it actually DOES that in practice, it has a distinct niche, and one that really doesn’t exist anywhere else.
But it also depends on whether MySpace users outside China are interested or not–and many will probably not be…
Any suggestions on which Chinese bands to check out?

uh, I think if you go to the Rock in China blog you can catch a few.http://rockinchina.wordpress.com/
And A Modern Lei Feng had a few posts on Chinese rock in the US and mentioned one or two:http://huoleifeng.blogspot.com/index.html
I ought to have some saved on my MySpace page but I never maintain it. Speaking of which, I posted some stuff on how MySpace doesn’t have very good GFW filtering and the .com/.cn barrier is kinda weird… second post down.

Actually, I don’t like it.
Before it was easier for us foreigners to make friends with chinese on myspace. Now we can’t seem to add them.
Truth is then, they had Myspace available in China before. Sad, google went and made it worse.

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Jason Li is a designer, illustrator and consultant currently based in Hong Kong. Once upon a time, he studied engineering and ran a news site about fan translations of video games.

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Lyn Jeffery is a cultural anthropologist and researcher at the Institute for the Future, a nonprofit group in Palo Alto, California. She studies new experiences enabled by connective technologies.